In virtual machine environments, a hypervisor running on a host hardware system creates a virtual system on which a guest operating system may execute. The virtual system includes a virtual storage volume on which the guest operating system stores its data. For example, the hypervisor may simulate a hard disk for the guest operating system that the hypervisor stores as a virtual disk file on the host system. The hypervisor may keep track of information necessary to execute the guest operating system and store that information by adding it to the end of the virtual disk file as metadata.
Storing metadata in this way makes the virtual disk file larger by the size of the metadata. However, the indicated size of the metadata will remain the size of the virtual disk file without the metadata. This variation in file size causes an issue where only the hypervisor or other programs designed to access the metadata of the hypervisor, such as programs produced by the same developer that produced the hypervisor, are able to perform actions on the virtual disk file.